Search and menus

Search

Topics menu

You are here:

Species-specific Models and Maps

Our aim here is to go beyond a single hardiness zone map and develop potential range maps for individual species of trees, shrubs and perennial herbs. Our approach is to develop a climate profile for each plant species using extensive distribution data and continent-wide climate models. These climatic profiles can then be mapped, giving an indication of the possible range of each species under current and future climate conditions.

We use two statistical methods to quantify the climatic niche of each plant species. ANUCLIM (details), is an early generation approach that identifies a species' climate envelope based on minimum and maximum climate values at known occurrence locations. Maxent (details) is a more recent software package that employs machine-learning to identify the probability that a species will occur at a given location, again based on known occurrence locations.